Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we still use RTGs in space on some satellites? Not counting extraterrestrial research, since those are definitely still powered by RTGs
The ones I speak of had actual reactors with moving parts. Most of them were Soviet, one was American (a research one, the soviet ones were active radar sats with a shelf life of only a few months). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A (The soviets called them US-A for some weird reason, lol). There were 33 of them, 3 of which have already crashed to earth.
But yeah RTGs are very nasty stuff too. They are much easier to secure against breaking apart on re-entry though (although dropping a concentrated plutonium source into a random place is not a great idea either obviously).
While I was lucky to have shop classes in my school, this curriculum makes me extremely jealous, to be honest. We didn't have neither welding, nor forging, nor working with fiberglass composites nor "big" projects, had to learn it all by myself. Still, those classes taught me the basics of actually doing something with my own hands, which is pretty important.
I also remember that we were trusted to behave like adults in front of heavy machinery like routers, circular saws and lathes.
No incidents whatsoever aside from minor cuts, which is normal. We were genuinely interested and behaved accordingly, nobody wanted to get hurt and / or get kicked out of the class
P.S. Not sure of how it works in the US, but we also had "shop classes for girls". The curriculum for those consisted of the basics of cooking, baking and working with fabrics (starting from sewing two pieces together in grade 5 and gradually evolving to designing and sewing clothing for yourself by grade 9). Though, in my opinion, those things shall be taught to everyone, not just girls
I had “agtech” in HS. Learning how to use a cutting torch and weld was the most memorable. Heh our welding unit was pretty much all about working on our teacher’s horse trailer. We also did hunter’s education which spent a lot of time on gun safety and was very useful. (Yes, I went to HS out in the sticks)
Both these (sløyd /woodworking, heimekunnskap/cooking and home economics) were mandatory for everyone in Norway back in the nineties(although to be fair shop time was limited to wood, we weren't allowed to use metal lathes etc anymore), as was sewing (both with hand and machines).
I'm still thankful because of all the stuff I can relatively easy cook, fix or make thanks to those few hours in school.
(I'd also say they made for extremely welcome breaks between boring stuff in other subjects and being bullied during breaks.)
My highschool had one of the few county vocational schools attached to it. We had things like construction tech, auto tech, PC repair (got your A+ in that class), networking (you get a CCENT), engineering drawing and basics, criminal justice, cosmetology, and what was essentially preschool teacher class along with many others I don't remember. Other schools in the county had different classes but ours was the biggest. The engineering classroom was my adhoc homeroom and the place I spent most days after school my senior year due to joining our FIRST robotics club. We had everything for doing woodworking but also had an old Bridgeport mill, a CNC router (I was the resident mastercam X expert) and a lathe. We did just about all of our robot fabrication there except for the TIG welding (local shop did it for free). The engineering drawing class also had a small woodworking shop too. Our engineering teacher taught freshmen at the local university so we came out of his classes being thoroughly prepared for college.
I bailed on my mechanical engineering major sophmore year and switched to computer engineering. I love building stuff with but just didn't enjoy statics class.
For all the focus on STEM education in the past couple decades, I'm surprised cooking never really came back in vogue. Cooking is applied science that we have to do every day. I had to figure it all out in my late 20s, because shop and home ec were gutted in the 90s in my district.
That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here!
The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok
As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar with their setups, with some differences (a lot of centres either use Windows-based diskless solutions that mount vhdx files as drives remotely over iSCSI, or use ZFS-based snapshotting, which is my personal favourite)
But all in all, seems like my dream house :)
I own a chain of LAN gaming centres, so the feedback is definitely skewered into the business perspective quite a bit
Why would you use headsets to play with friends in person? The whole point is that you can talk directly, usually with the sound completely off on everyone’s computers, and not too loud music playing in the background
For one, if you get a bunch of nerds together a sizable fraction are likely to have sensory issues- and won’t come again if you don’t make it welcoming for them
Some video games require some sound as it shares information, but can usually be configured to only have those sounds, or to turn on an accessible visual indicator
Correct! We never wear headsets at LAN parties because it defeats the purpose.
Each computer has a sound bar and everyone just uses that. Yeah, that means everyone's sound gets mixed up and you don't get positional audio, but in practice it's fine and we'd rather be able to yell at each other.
Honestly it's just that how I've always done this, other ways seemed too noisy for me and breaking the flow of the game :)
That might or might not be due to the games we've mostly been playing on our LAN parties are coming from a bit different profile than "chill co-op" — more MOBAs or tactical / arena shooters. In those styles of games visual cues don't really help and not having the clear audio puts you at a disadvantage
The music is still playing in the background, though — the headsets are not 100% soundproof and you may still easily communicate via VoIP
Yeah, the "live talking" aspect without headsets isn't there, but I've found it doesn't bother me in the slightest. You still are in the same room, you get the "shoulder sense" of your team there, you still celebrate and have fun as one and lose as one singular organism, and that's the feeling I've kinda been chasing on my LAN parties and in my LAN centre
CCBoot is a Windows Server-based diskless solution I mentioned, and they also provide CCDisk, which can do "hybrid" mode — where there is a small SSD in every PC with base OS pre-installed and pre-configured, which then mounts an iSCSI game drive
GGRock is a fantastic product, in my opinion. It is pricy, but where as CCBoot relies heavily on knowing it's inner workings, GGRock is pretty much turnkey solution
There is also CCu Cloud Update, which I have heard of, but didn't try myself, since they sell licenses only in Asia, from what I remember
LANGAME Premium is an addon for LAN centre ERP system, which is basically an ITAAS solution based on TrueNAS. Of all paid offerings that one is my favourite so far — but you have to use their ERP and actually run a business for it to be cost-effective
NetX provides an all-in-one (router, traffic filter and iSCSI target) NUC-like server with pre-configured software on a subscription basis. I am most skeptical of that just on the basis that, from my research, two NVMe drives can't really handle the load from a fully occupied 40+ machines LAN centre. Not for a long time, at least
...and homebrew, of course. I myself am running a homebrew ZFS-based system which I'm extremely happy with
In your case, I'd go with building my own thing too. Does not take a lot of time if you know the inner workings and you have no additional OPEX for your room :)
We were running a small internet cafe with gaming computers around 2000 and I found some bootable solution that you installed on every computer. It saved all changes temporarily and flushed everything on reboot, starting from the clean install you prepared the day before. Sadly there was no way of central storage possible with that program. Would have loved to build this setup at that time but money is always short.
Loving it. It looks a bit different from libadwaita's components, but different in a good way
What I would enjoy, though, is having a set of pre-built example pages (a sample dashboard, for example) that I can navigate to right from the docs page
While this particular flavour of kitchen automation looks simple enough, sadly, the best automation there is for such tasks are still humans, due to cost reasons
Mikrotik is decent! While there is some lackluster hardware (and, to be honest, most of their wireless AP solutions kinda suck), I've ran Mikrotik on two small-scale networks (~60 devices each, not including WiFi) + my home network, and had no issues whatsoever. Love them
I find the management software to be... lacking. That's where ubiquti does great, in my opinion. I have some Mikrotik wireless wires and they're great but I never look forward to having to touch them (which is extremely rare).
I rarely visit HN and mostly lurk here, not sure what you're trying to point out.
I was myself hit by the issue, unfortunately, and I strongly believe that weaponising open-source is not how things should be done, so I decided to post. An attempt to bring this into limelight, if you wish
This incident sets a dangerous precedent in breaking a chain of trust that today's software development heavily relies on
How are regular developers going to vet the literally 1000s of Node.js dependencies they rely on?
And who's signing these updates? The package owner? Well, he's the one adding malicious code so he can sign whatever he wants.
I'll say it again, Node.js needs a proper standard library like Go that takes care of common needs most people have. It's been improving but it was a historical mistake to let microdependencies run wild.
> How are regular developers going to vet the literally 1000s of Node.js dependencies they rely on?
Perhaps they shouldn't be relying on thousands of NPM packages. It's not difficult to write JS code that doesn't `npm install` the entire package ecosystem.
Oh, please. The only thing missing was to accuse asn007 of being a "Russian troll", although I suppose you realized that that would not be appropriate in this case.
Sorry that’s what you took from it, if you’re looking for an apology. People are interesting, that’s all, and I am curious about how they tick. There is a difference between “How odd!” and “This person is up to no good.”
Whether someone is a “Russian troll” or not really doesn’t concern me, and I wouldn’t call someone out if I thought they were (that’s a mod’s problem and poor form), nor was that what I was insinuating.
